New IPv4 allocation policy

Since IP addresses are essential for the existence of the World Wide Web, it is crucial for unique IPs to be continuously generated for the period of its existence. Yet for the past twenty years web usage has expanded greatly. Today it’s highly unlikely to find a place with no Internet connection available. Whether through LAN cable or wireless through Wi-Fi, 3G and even 4G networks, today you can be online anywhere.

Also, there are ever so many devices that we use in our daily lives which connect to the web. Smartphones, GPS navigations, TV sets, gaming consoles and even new cameras all require recurring software updates. As a result of all this, the number of remaining unassigned IPv4 addresses globally has dropped to a minimum.

The solution comes in the form of the more recent IPv6 system for IPs. This is the certain future of IP addresses and we’ll migrate to it in the following several weeks.

Because of this, we need to apply some temporary measures for the optimal use of the unassigned dedicated IPs on our platform.

The history behind the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses

Created in the early 1980s the IPv4 has a limitation of about 4.3 billion addresses available. For that time, this was more than satisfying capacity. However few could have predicted the massive growth and usage of the Internet in the following decades.

By the early 1990s there were already prognoses on the IPv4 address depletion.

IETF (the Internet Engineering Task Force) even formed a special working group. Their task was to analyze the rate of IPv4 adoption.

The conclusion from their analysis was that a new version of the Internet Protocol needs to be created as soon as possible. And this new version needs to have larger assigning capabilities.

Several years later in 1998, IETF introduced the new Internet Protocol version 6. Along with it, IETF also finalized  the header format of RFC 2460 as well. From this moment on, the migration to IPv6 was only a question of time and of course the handling of multiple technical issues.

Prior to the IPv6 migration network admins had to re-work a major part of the World Wide Web. All of this turned out to be an immensely sluggish process. It took almost 20 years until the mass adoption of the IPv6. For instance, as of 2015 only 21% of Google’s U.S. traffic came from IPv6 connections. And this was the the highest annual IPv6 usage rate in the world so far.

However, more than 31% of this traffic came from IPv6 connections by January 2017.

By mid-2015 the online authorities have finally began to prepare a statement, since the IPv4 address depletion problem could no longer be ignored.

In September 2015, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) or the organization responsible for the assigning of IP addresses in North America made an official statement on the IPv4 address depletion:

This was actually the very first time that ARIN didn’t have enough free IP addresses to assign. As a temporary solution they suggested the aforementioned type of IPv4 distribution. Needless to say, the only long-term solution remains IPv6.

What is the difference between IPv4 and IPv6?

The function of IP addresses (Internet Protocol addresses) is to serve as unique identifiers assigned to each and every computer network connected system.

They were created almost four decades ago. The IPv4 system which has a capacity of nearly 4.3 billion unique IP addresses. At the time, this seemed more than enough combinations for the foreseeable future.

The IPv6 system on the other hand is capable of accommodating the astonishing number of about 340 gajillion different IP addresses. This is possible, because it uses both numbers and letters in long combinations.

The IPv4 and the IPv6 system work in parallel without any side effect for regular Internet users.

The IPv6 deployment on our platform is currently in progress

Ever since ARIN’s announcement in September 2015, the migration from IPv4 to IPv6 started running at full throttle. It’s always been a time and effort taking process, due to the multiple technicalities. However with the IPv4 IP addresses running out, there’s no other alternative but migration to IPv6.

We’ve been preparing our platform for this transition for some time. Right now, it’s only a question of time when we’ll have finished performing our extensive tests. Then a trouble-free migration will be possible.

Since this will take some time, there are some measures we’ll be taking to temporarily deal with the IPv4 address depletion on a local level. From Monday, January 16, 2017, we have made the following temporary modifications:

• Managed OpenVZ VPS packages (plans from 4 to 10) will offer 1 dedicated IP address instead of the current 2 IPs;
• Dedicated servers will come with 1 dedicated IP address instead of the current 3 IPs;
• The three IP upgrade options for dedicated server users will now include 1, 2 and 3 IP addresses, respectively, instead of the current 3, 6 and 9 IPs;
• the price of a single dedicated IP address ordered as an upgrade will become $3.00 USD/mo;

NOTE: We make these changes to ensure that the IPv4 addresses on our web hosting platform are used as efficiently as possible. Server clients on our advanced platform have been enabled to use just one single dedicated IP address for: the Control Panel license, the hosted domains and the SSL certificates. They can do this flawlessly with each of the control panels that we offer: Hepsia, cPanel and DirectAdmin.

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Due to the depletion of the ARIN’s unreserved IPv4 addresses, we currently have no other option but to apply the aforementioned temporary measures. The moment our future-proof IPv6 infrastructure is ready for a trouble-free launch, we will revert all of the dedicated IP address quotas to their original levels.